Tag Archives: PubMed Labs

On Wednesday, August 14, 2019 at 11AM, NCBI staff will show you PubMed Labs, a test site that will become the default PubMed early next year. You will get a preview of the new, modern interface, updated features including advanced search, clipboard, options for sharing results, and the new “cite” button. You’ll also learn about features that are still under development and how to give us your feedback on the new PubMed.

The August 14 webinar session is full. We will make the recording available and are offering an encore session on August 28, 2019.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.

In PubMed Labs, you can now use your clipboard as a scratchpad to temporarily collect citations. You can save a maximum of 500 citations at a time from one or more searches and you don’t need to log in to use this feature. However, the items saved to your clipboard will expire after 8 hours of inactivity.

We’ve recently added save and share options to PubMed Labs. From your PubMed Labs search results list, you can now use the ‘Save’ button to save a selection of results in a variety of formats, including Summary and Abstract. You can also use the ‘Email’ button to share a selection of results, including abstracts, with colleagues.

Figure 1. Click on the ‘Share’ button to share to Twitter and Facebook.

Thank you for your feedback! The community response to our launch of PubMed Labs has been outstanding. We are continuing to test new features at PubMed Labs, like the addition of a new view for search results.

Update #2: As announced July 31, 2018, the PubMed Health website has been shut down as of October 31, 2018.

NLM thanks you for using PubMed Health over the years.

Update #1: As reported previously, the PubMed Health website will shut down on October 31, 2018. This decision was made so the National Library of Medicine (NLM) can consolidate its consumer health and comparative effectiveness resources to make them easier to find.

In an effort to consolidate similar resources and make information easier to find, the National Library of Medicine will be retiring its PubMed Health website, effective October 31, 2018, and providing the same or similar content through more widely used NLM resources, namely PubMed, MedlinePlus, and Bookshelf.

PubMed Health content falls into two general categories: consumer health resources and systematic reviews/comparative effectiveness research (CER). A similar range of consumer health information to that in PubMed Health is available from NLM’s MedlinePlus, while the systematic reviews and CER in PubMed Health are searchable through PubMed, which links to the full text (when available) in Bookshelf, journals, and/or PubMed Central.

NLM needs your input. We are experimenting with a new PubMed search algorithm, as well as a modern, mobile-first user interface, and want to know what you think. You can try out these experimental elements at PubMed Labs, a website we created for the very purpose of giving potential new PubMed features a test drive and gathering user opinions.

Please note that PubMed Labs includes only a limited set of features at this time and not the full set of PubMed tools. The absence of a feature or tool on PubMed Labs does not mean we plan to eliminate it from PubMed; it simply means we are not testing it now!

The key elements we are testing are:

A new search algorithmfor ranking (ordering) the best matches to your query

Based on analysis of data obtained from anonymous PubMed search logs, we have developed a new algorithm that we believe does a much better job of sorting search results by their relevance, or “best match,” to your query. This new algorithm incorporates machine learning to re-rank the top articles returned.

We were so excited by results with this algorithm that we already implemented it in PubMed, but it is still experimental and we would very much appreciate hearing what you think. Part of our test in PubMed Labs is having best match be the default sort, instead of PubMed’s default of sorting by most recent articles. If you find that you prefer to sort by the most recent articles instead, it takes only a simple click of a button to do so.

About two years ago, NCBI launched PubMed Labs, a gathering place for discovering and experimenting with new features and content for NCBI’s family of websites. Over those years, we launched a few experiments that have helped us learn more about our customers and how we can serve them better.

Today we’re happy to announce that we’re expanding PubMed Labs to a broader set of experiments called NCBI Labs.

Why are we doing this?

To better convey the breadth of upcoming experiments on data, services, and websites that NCBI offers now and hopes to offer in the future. You can expect to see new features, content, and other experiments from NCBI Labs in the coming months.

What Will Change?

This blog’s menu item and blog category “PubMed Labs” will now appear as “NCBI Labs”. Existing links will continue to work. We won’t be updating the old blog posts, for the most part, although some links on existing sites (e.g. on PubMed Journals) may be updated to use the new name.

About the NCBI

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, provides access to scientific and biomedical databases, software tools for analyzing molecular data, and performs research in computational biology.